[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Open Office? (Page 1 of 2)
Posted: 8/24/2010 7:13:35 AM EDT
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I live in a small town with a small school district, which has an even smaller budget. I recently downloaded Open Office to play around with and I think this could be a good way for our district to save some cash. I'm sure it will provide everything a kid needs to make a report on chinchillas. Would this be a viable alternative for our district? If it saves even a few pennies vs. MS office products I think it will be worth it.
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Quoted: Open Office will actually work on MS files.  Impeach Obama because He is NOT Teachable.   I actually downloaded it just to see if it was fully compatible with MS stuff. Granted I don't push any of the MS Office programs to their fullest, but none the less it was easy to pick up. |
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It may put your students at a disadvantage when it comes to the "real world" and all they've used is Open Office instead of MS Office. Or it may not, since kids can usually learn computer programs quickly.
Having said that, I'm a computer guy and I can't stand Open Office. I find it less intuitive to use, and not as stable. Are you able to get any kind of educational or bulk discount from MS? |
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It may put your students at a disadvantage when it comes to the "real world" and all they've used is Open Office instead of MS Office. Or it may not, since kids can usually learn computer programs quickly. Having said that, I'm a computer guy and I can't stand Open Office. I find it less intuitive to use, and not as stable. Are you able to get any kind of educational or bulk discount from MS? I gotta go with this. I like free stuff and all, but having a nice looking report on chinchillas is not going to prepare them for any type of job in a typical business environment because, by and large, they all use MS Office. ETA Call them up. MS is pretty good about giving away software, or at least heavily discounting software, for educational purposes. They like to hook 'em while their young.  People can hate all they want, but in all my time spent in college I landed LEGIT full versions of Windows XP Pro, Windows 7 Pro, Office XP Pro, 2003 Pro, 2007 Pro, Visual Studio 2003, 2005, and 2008 Pro, all for a combined price of under $200 bucks.
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I use it at home since I don't want to drop that much cash on MS Office. I put it on my girlfriends computer for the same reason, and she is able to complete and turn in assignments in a MS format without any problems.
It does the job. I use MS Office at work for 9 hours a day so once I got used to the different menu options and layout it wasn't a bad transition. Agreed on learning MS Office, though- almost every business out there uses it, so it's a vaulable skill. Seems like using Office is on the same list as using phones and copiers when it comes to general office skills. |
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I used OO for about a year in college while I played around with Linux. It didn't take long to learn many functions. I noticed that even while saving in MS extensions there would be occasional formatting issues. On my computer they looked fine but when I handed in a report the professor questioned why the format was so messed up. I had a couple problems with presentations too. |
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It worked OK for me, but it was a little flaky about running in a Remote Console session. Sometimes I'd try to open a document in one session, and it wouldn't open until I opened another session, at which time it opened automatically. The spreadsheet application is not 100% compatible with Excel. Text treatments don't translate well in it. |
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Using Open Office will not put those kids at a disadvantage. Anyone who has us MS Office products can use Open Office and vice versa. Very true. When I was in college, WordPerfect was the office suite of choice. I transitioned to MS Office and now I use Open Office because it is stupid to pay $400 for an office suite. I had a buddy that used to work at Microsoft. He could get me MS Office in the company store for $60. I passed. But I did get it for my niece and nephew when they headed off to college. If I had to pay full price for it I would have told them to download Open Office. |
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Office 2010 marks the debut of free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, which work in popular web browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari). A new edition of Office, Office Starter 2010, replaced the low-end home productivity software, Microsoft Works.
Jus' sayin. |
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Quoted: Office 2010 marks the debut of free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, which work in popular web browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari). A new edition of Office, Office Starter 2010, replaced the low-end home productivity software, Microsoft Works. Jus' sayin. Does that require bandwidth to use? Jus' sayin. |
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I use OpenOffice in Linux and have had no issues. Looks a little different from current MS Office, but I don't see that as a negative. MS Office will probably change appearance three times before these kids leave school and join the workforce, anyway. Who knows, by then OpenOffice and Office may look identical. I would get OO for the school. And as mentioned above, Lotus Symphony is more reliable (earlier version of OpenOffice, but has been streamlined by IBM). |
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I live in a small town with a small school district, which has an even smaller budget. I recently downloaded Open Office to play around with and I think this could be a good way for our district to save some cash. I'm sure it will provide everything a kid needs to make a report on chinchillas. Would this be a viable alternative for our district? If it saves even a few pennies vs. MS office products I think it will be worth it. When I was in college a couple of years ago, I got Office 2007 for about $10 per license via my university bookstore. Evil Microsoft generally offers Office licenses at very low rates for students, educators, and institutional use. It's in Microsoft's best interest to get kids hooked on Office early, so when they get older, they pay full price. |
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Here at work I run Excel for everyone. Some users I give the MS Standard package but for the most part everyone has Excel and use OO word processor program for what simple letters they may do.
I found OO spreadsheet didn't work right with certain things once you got a little bit more complex or working with databases. I would think you could get some type of educated discount on MS products though As for setting kids back, kids usually pick things up pretty quick but if they're using text books to learn with most of them are going to be written based on MS Products and that's what they're most likely to see in the workforce. Also you will have to be sure to default it so that it saves in MS ext vs OO ext One good thing about OO is that kids can download and install at home which will save the parents money but MS is suppose to have cloud version of some of their Office apps Personally I would look at getting Edu discounts and teaching on the platform they are more than likely to use going forward in their education |
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I have been using IBM Lotus Symphony and like it. Free and built off of the OO platform, appears more polished and sable then OO. Really? Symphony is still around? I have it on 5.25" disks in my garage. 
There are definitely compatibility issues between MS and OO. I find this to be a major issue as I do a lot of presentations. I've found too many times where I can do something in Powerpoint and finish an awesome presentation that looks like crap or worse yet doesn't function as designed (animations, layout, etc) when I move it to my Linux laptop which is what I use when mobile. I've pretty much given up the notion of moving presentations between platforms and use my Windows netbook now instead of the Linux laptop so I don't get stuck. I've had to change things more than once. |
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I recently got a new computer with Windows 7, Microsoft no longer offers Works and it doesn't work on Win 7, so what to do with spreadsheets created in Works? Open Office opens them and lets you work on them, when you want to save your work it warns you it might not save everything correctly if you save to the Works format, but you can convert to Open Office format without any problems, so Open Office saved me from having to put create brand new spreadsheets and hours of work transferring the info to a new format. I have had Open Office for a number of years, but didn't use it much because it was slow to load, the new computers are so much faster that is no longer an issue. Another program not supported by Win 7 is Front Page, Open Office has an editor that isn't quite up to Front Page standards, but it works and the price is right. |
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Office 2010 marks the debut of free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, which work in popular web browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari). A new edition of Office, Office Starter 2010, replaced the low-end home productivity software, Microsoft Works.
Jus' sayin. Does that require bandwidth to use? Jus' sayin. If someone can download OO, they can use the free versions of MS Office that they're providing. 
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I live in a small town with a small school district, which has an even smaller budget. I recently downloaded Open Office to play around with and I think this could be a good way for our district to save some cash. I'm sure it will provide everything a kid needs to make a report on chinchillas. Would this be a viable alternative for our district? If it saves even a few pennies vs. MS office products I think it will be worth it. My entire team uses it every day. Yes, it friggin rocks. |
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Quoted: It worked OK for me, but it was a little flaky about running in a Remote Console session. Sometimes I'd try to open a document in one session, and it wouldn't open until I opened another session, at which time it opened automatically. The spreadsheet application is not 100% compatible with Excel. Text treatments don't translate well in it. Plus elementary kids these days. Always using rcon sessions when they're not supposed to. |
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OO is great software. You should also consider a Linux desktop for the kids workstations, Debian, Mint, some other flavor designed for .edu institutions...... my son has a Debian (Stable) desktop he uses (he's 6). Debian/Ubuntu Stable also makes a great server platform, I have several of my own in addition to a heap of RHEL machines at work. distrowatch.com is always a great place to check about once a week. |
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Using Open Office will not put those kids at a disadvantage. Anyone who has us MS Office products can use Open Office and vice versa. Very true. When I was in college, WordPerfect was the office suite of choice. I transitioned to MS Office and now I use Open Office because it is stupid to pay $400 for an office suite. I had a buddy that used to work at Microsoft. He could get me MS Office in the company store for $60. I passed. But I did get it for my niece and nephew when they headed off to college. If I had to pay full price for it I would have told them to download Open Office. When I was in college I used a program called "wordstar" on dos3.0. Everything was on these big floppy disks and the documents were not wysiwyg, so you had to use formatting commands. Sometimes you could hit the wrong key and your stuff would either dissapear or become unreadable. 
The kids are writing papers, not learning to program. They will not be crippled from this for cripes sake, there is plenty of time to learn how to use other programs. People my age still used pen and paper yet many of us have graduated to using computers. PC's even! |
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I recently got a new computer with Windows 7, Microsoft no longer offers Works and it doesn't work on Win 7, so what to do with spreadsheets created in Works? Open Office opens them and lets you work on them, when you want to save your work it warns you it might not save everything correctly if you save to the Works format, but you can convert to Open Office format without any problems, so Open Office saved me from having to put create brand new spreadsheets and hours of work transferring the info to a new format. I have had Open Office for a number of years, but didn't use it much because it was slow to load, the new computers are so much faster that is no longer an issue. Another program not supported by Win 7 is Front Page, Open Office has an editor that isn't quite up to Front Page standards, but it works and the price is right. My netbook has works on it. I also have a trial version of office that just ran out but I am hesitant to update it. Windows 7 does not have moviemaker although I understand you can download it. |
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When I was in college I used a program called "wordstar" on dos3.0. Everything was on these big floppy disks and the documents were not wysiwyg, so you had to use formatting commands. Sometimes you could hit the wrong key and your stuff would either dissapear or become unreadable.
I used to LOVE Wordstar. I used it all the time when I was in the Navy. Those formatting commands could be a real bitch though.
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Quoted: Quoted: When I was in college I used a program called "wordstar" on dos3.0. Everything was on these big floppy disks and the documents were not wysiwyg, so you had to use formatting commands. Sometimes you could hit the wrong key and your stuff would either dissapear or become unreadable. I used to LOVE Wordstar. I used it all the time when I was in the Navy. Those formatting commands could be a real bitch though. I used Wordstar in CP/M 3.0 on a Commodore 128 when I was back in college. Loved that system. Later on I got Word Writer. I still have the C-128 and the software. I should put it all back together and boot it up and show my nieces and nephews how far we've come. |
| Schools get insane discounts on MS software. A lot of times MS will give them free or a very cheap volume license through MSDN. You are talking about saving $100 in the grand scheme of things. It would cost more than that just to get the teachers 'training' on new software and you're hurting the students because they are not learning what most companies/colleges use on a daily basis. If your school district is that strapped they need to save pennies then they have bigger issues than software. |
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Quoted: I've had compatibility issues when transferring .docx files between openoffice and MS word, however apparently it looks im the minority here. .docx is one of the dumbest things MS ever did. If you set up Open Office to always save in .doc/.xls/.ppt file formats you are good to go 99% of the time. If you use some complex formatting you might get some conversion errors with newer versions of MS Office. If I were starting from scratch, I would use Open Office - but I'd also use Linux for both servers and desktops. I am also very intrigued by Google Docs - $50 per user per year - and the features are pretty sweet. |
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I love Open Office and used it throughout college. My only gripe is/was IIRC it would screw the format up if you opened up certain types of documents. It screwed me on a powerpoint because of this. A couple of my images wouldn't work after I opened it at the library with MSOffice right before my presentation. Otherwise it has been great. Its flexible enough to get me through a very wide list of classes that require papers, powerpoint, excel, etc. |
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Another program not supported by Win 7 is Front Page, Open Office has an editor that isn't quite up to Front Page standards, but it works and the price is right. All the front page functionality was combined into Word. You can do all that functionality there now. If you are creating HTML pages I suggest you look at another free product becuase they both suck very bad http://webdesign.about.com/od/windowshtmleditors/tp/free-windows-editors.htm |
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It screwed me on a powerpoint because of this. A couple of my images wouldn't work after I opened it at the library with MSOffice right before my presentation. My biggest gripe in addition to images is video. Most of the time I've found they don't play at all after opening the PPT with OO. I've taken to copying the video to a USB drive and re-adding it to the slide. |
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I use it for school. 1) It isn't as intuitive as MS. 2) Compatibility exists, but you need to play with the formats beforehand. It's kind of hit and miss at times and I've lost entire classes of work that can't transfer over (entire ppts where the images are all gone when pulled up in MS). 3) Free is good, just know the limitations and follow #2 and you'll be okay. |
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Quoted: I live in a small town with a small school district, which has an even smaller budget. I recently downloaded Open Office to play around with and I think this could be a good way for our district to save some cash. I'm sure it will provide everything a kid needs to make a report on chinchillas. Would this be a viable alternative for our district? If it saves even a few pennies vs. MS office products I think it will be worth it. Certainly. |
